Zycus Horizon Dispatch 4 – A Conservative Source-To-Pay Growth Path

Zycus Horizon kicked off its second day earlier this morning. Pierre Mitchell and I will continue to cover the activities live from the event today, and offer a more distilled – or shall we say barrel aged – view of things to come out of the show, including our customer and product observations on Spend Matters PRO later this week. As we look back on some of the highlights from the keynote yesterday, one element that keeps coming back to mind is how conservative Zycus has been on rolling out its P2P solution set.

Aatish Dedhia, Zycus’ founder and CEO, noted during his keynote on Monday that it has been 4.5 years since Zycus started investing in the P2P area (which it defines as “e-procurement + e-invoicing + supplier network”). And what does Zycus have to show for it today? Four P2P customers. That’s right – 4 customers, all middle market companies. There have been many other vendors in the sector with 10% of the development team of Zycus that have brought entire P2P products to market in half the time.

But good P2P can’t be rushed. There are so many nuances to transactional buying – catalog management, general navigation, workflow, the shopping experience, bridging SKUs and related services in a single requisition, etc. And Zycus is taking its time in building what it describes as a “seamless, integrated source-to-pay suite."

What is our impression so far? It appears that Zycus is headed down the right path to success with what it has latched onto as “guided buying” for e-procurement – the early interface impressions (from what we’ve seen so far) are good and the “buying” is prescriptive to help requisitioners find what they need. But the 4.5 years in development will now have to translate into faster commercial traction and continued learning from a larger set of customers. Other next generation e-procurement tools (BuyerQuest, Vroozi, etc.) are not sitting still, let alone the dozens of other players in the market that Zycus is aiming to beat.